‘The Sympathizer’ is a tense black comedy that’s also a moving story about friendship

What is more psychically exhausting, in fiction and I suppose in life, than the story of the double agent, the mole, the traitor embedded among those he’s working against? We’ll see them assembled together at the same table in one scene, set in “the natural habitat of the most dangerous creature on earth, the white man in a suit and tie — the steakhouse.” There is Claude, a CIA agent, with whom the Captain, in his secret police guise, works in Saigon, and who turns up in Los Angeles, walking a variety of dogs for cover. And finally there is Nikos, called the Auteur in the novel, who is making a Vietnam movie, “The Hamlet” — it’s Nguyen’s riff on “Apocalypse Now” — and hires the Captain as an “authenticity consultant.” Giving the Vietnamese characters some lines, the Captain suggests, would be a start. Some of the dialogue is conjecture but it helps to explain the events that follow,” and “I don’t think this scene is extraneous, but if it offends you, feel free to skip it.” Books Viet Thanh Nguyen tackles Vietnam War’s aftermath in ‘The Sympathizer’ Much of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, “The Sympathizer”, takes place in the bland stucco flatlands of Los Angeles between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the staging and aftermath of a failed counterrevolution by members of the displaced anti-communist Vietnamese diaspora several years later. By contrast, an entrepreneurial ex-major will tell the Captain, “If you fully commit to this land, you become fully American, but if you don’t you’re just a wandering ghost living between two worlds, forever.” And while the series concentrates on the powerful — and formerly powerful — Park also does a fine job of evoking the ordinary, healthy community around them, establishing itself anew at various events and gatherings.